On the evening before Black Friday, it’s clear what this years popular toys is going to be for Santa. Watch out for the Zhu Zhu Pets invasion

The popular fuzzy robotic toy hamsters are in such great demand, that the toy will probably get sold on eBay for a significant mark up when it’s gets sold out in the stores on Black Friday. A mark up of 5x is not strange for the Zhu Zhu Pets to be sold for. If you really want to be sure you get these, there is no price too high for the hamsters.

Explosion of Zhu Zhu Pets Searches

Towards the holidays shopping season, the number of people searching for a sweet deal on Zhu Zhu Pets is al too clear in the search volume on eBay. The number of searches on eBay for Zhu Zhu Pets is peaking in the run up towards Black Friday. Below is a graph of the # of searches on a 7 day moving average basis.

In comparison with other popular Christmas gifts which probably will be on the hot products list, Zhu Zhu Pets leaves these far behind. The Iphone, the Wii, and the Xbox 360 are again this years hot products.

The value of the shopping search data is enormous. Google insights does not show a similar trend. Probably because the typical search on a search engine is not only shopping related, but contains more searches with a different intent. However, even on Google product search the sharp surge in Zhu Zhu Pets searches is not visible when combined with iPhone, Wii and Xbox 360.

If it wasn’t enough difficult to rank on the first page of Google, with all the competition, universal search includes. Now, Google is even showing less results on some search result pages. Normally, the first 10 results on any search query are already competitive. Most SEO’s will know how the click distribution on average is allocated to the different positions, with the majority going to the top 10. With less results on the first page, it will become even more difficult to get any traffic on relevant pages if you are not the brand owner, Wikipedia or Google.

Below you see a SERP for Zhu Zhu Pets on Google.nl, where the first page only has 8 real results. The page with 8 results looks so short… There is something missing!